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July 22nd, 2010

On 21 July, I was privileged to hear Irwin Cotler deliver the Gandel Oration for the B’nai B’rith Anti Defamation Commission in Sydney, Australia. His topic –Contemporary Anti-Semitism and How We Can Overcome it.

Cotler is a Canadian MP, famed human rights lawyer and one of the world’s foremost experts on racism, genocide and Anti-Semitism. Continue reading →

TORONTO (JTA) — Toronto police quelled tensions between Jews and anti-Israel activists at the campus of one of Canada’s largest universities for the second time in two weeks.

Hillel@York, the on-campus club for Jewish students at Toronto’s York University, said that anti-Israel activists “isolated and threatened Jewish students” during a Feb. 12 news conference on the fallout from a three-month-long strike that ended recently at York.

Campus Anti-Semitism:The Issues Have Changed, the Problem Has Not
By Janet Lubman Rathner and Alison GoldsteinJewish students in the 21st century might well face cases of anti-Semitism on campus, but the causes are considerably different than those that plagued their parents and grandparents in decades past. While, in the last century, the main problem involved the imposition of “quotas”—and an illogical hate of Jews—now it often has to do with the Middle East conflict.

At a recent University of California, Irvine (UCI) rally organized by the Muslim Student Union, a member applauded the use of Palestinian suicide bombers in Israel while another showed off a swastika tattoo.

These actions—indicative of the years-long pattern of hostile behavior directed toward UCI‘s Jewish students—led the Orange County (Calif.) Independent Task Force on Anti-Semitism on Campus to make a shocking recommendation in a report released in February: “Students with a strong Jewish identity should consider enrolling elsewhere unless, and until, tangible changes are made.”

According to the report, anti-Semitism on the UCI campus is thriving because “[t]he Chancellor has failed to exercise his moral authority as an educator and leader by abrogating his leadership responsibilities. The boundaries of rational and reasonable discourse by constituencies that have differing positions on emotional issues have not been established.”

UCI‘s extensive and ongoing xenophobic atmosphere is what led to the creation of the task force in 2006.

“We looked at [the task force] as a way to bring the community together,” says Ted Bleiweis, public relations chairman for the task force. Bleiweis says that, in this kind of environment, “the situation for Jewish students is untenable because of the hatred.” Continue reading →